Numerology.
The magic of round numbers led some fans to expect a bumper Ansible
this month. But, remembering an early double issue and nine with numbers
like 53 1/2 , this is the 208th.... To mark the non-occasion, the
British Library reproved me for putting the print version's ISSN in the
on-line edition. Instead I have had another ISSN thrust upon me, with
stern instructions to distinguish print from digital by using both
numbers in both editions. This makes life so much simpler.

Andrew
M. Butler won the 2004 Pioneer Award for sf criticism, with
his essay 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom' (SF Studies
#91, November 2003). [FM]

Orson
Scott Card has a crushingly final word on the current hot
issue of gay and lesbian marriage in the USA: 'In the first place, no
law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden
homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his
heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to
marry a man....' [Closely reasoned examples omitted.] 'So it is
a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right
pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have
to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in
marriage.'

Cory
Doctorow names no names in his 12 February speech to the
O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference: '... I was shocked silly by
legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for
carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL
should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many
infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory
infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by
our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the
loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.  Now there was
a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the world would
be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing and
censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to,
including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own,
what was an unlawful copyright infringement – something more usually
left up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
esteemed copyright scholars.  This was a stupendously dumb idea,
and it offended me down to my boots. Writers are supposed to be
advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my
colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share
it with the rest of the world.' I take the point about not suing the
post office over dubious mail, but ... The free expression of Cory
Doctorow giving his own work away (including
this
speech, placed in the public domain) strikes me as rather
different from that of some talentless git with a scanner who rips off
other authors' creations. I must be an old fogey.

Harlan
Ellison's lawsuit against AOL continues, with the US Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals
partly
reversing though partly affirming the 2002 district court's
adverse decision, with 'Each party to bear its own costs' and the road
open for further exciting litigation. Apparently the case goes back to
the district court for a jury to decide (a) whether AOL is guilty of
contributory copyright infringement; (b) if so, whether or not AOL
qualifies for 'safe harbor' under the DMCA. More as it happens.

Jasper
Fforde's Lost in a Good Book won the Dilys Award as
2003 favourite of the US Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
[SFS]

Edwin
Morgan, 83-year-old Scots poet and sf enthusiast, has been
chosen as his country's national poet or 'Scots Makar', equivalent to
the Poet Laureate. His 'space poetry' was broadcast on BBC Radio in
1966; he was in the sf verse anthology Holding Your Eight Hands
(1969). [JB]

Terry
Pratchett on all those US awards for The Wee Free Men
(see A199): 'Oh dear. I don't know whether to be worried or
pleased that a book containing words like "susurration",
treating witches with respect and featuring a mob of drunken, thieving,
swearing Scottish pixies is considered wonderful by the great and good
of the US YA Book world, but I nurse a sneaking desire for someone to
ban it....  It's the 21st anniversary of DW this autumn. There
will be dancing in a street.'  Michael Bishop helpfully
adds: 'Just thought you should know I've written a new fantasy
Christmas-themed novel called Wee Free Kings.'

Robert
Silverberg is the 2004 recipient of what is now called the
Damon Knight Memorial Grandmaster award, from SFWA. [BW] In his own
words: 'It's an awesome thing to be put up there in the same company as
Heinlein, Asimov, De Camp, Leiber, Simak, van Vogt, and the rest of that
crew. I'm still pretty stunned. This isn't modesty I'm expressing – far
from it. Just awe. These guys were my boyhood heroes and now I am one of
them.'

As
Others See Us. 'This column's favourite novel of 2003, William
Gibson's Pattern Recognition, has been shortlisted for two big
awards – only Sci Fi awards but better than a poke in the eye.' (Jeremy
Jehu, 'Best Sellers', ITV Teletext reviews, 13 February) [MB]

R.I.P.Donald Barr (1921-2004), US author and academic best known in sf
circles for his space opera Space Relations (1973), died on 5
February. He was 82. [PDF]  Islwyn Ffowc Elis (1924-2004),
Welsh author of popular Welsh-language novels including the sf Y
Blaned Dirion (The Fair Planet, 1968), died on 22 January at
age 79. [SH]  Peter Garratt (1949-2004), UK psychologist,
fan and author, died unexpectedly on 2 March, perhaps from a heart
attack; he was 54. David Pringle writes: 'I've known Pete for over 30
years, and he was a kind friend, so obviously this is deeply saddening
for me, as I'm sure it will be for many others who knew him well – and
also for those who knew him socially, from writers' groups or sf
conventions, or through his stories in magazines and anthologies. We
published at least nine stories by Pete in Interzone over the
years, the first being "If the Driver Vanishes – " (IZ
13) ... He also had stories in many small-press magazines, and one in
Asimov's SF.'  Julius Schwartz (1915-2004), US
fan, literary agent, influential comics editor, and in later life a DC
Comics consultant and 'goodwill ambassador' to conventions, died on 8
February aged 88. With Mort Weisinger he coedited what many regard as
the first true sf fanzine, The Time Traveller (1932); his and
Weisinger's agency Solar Sales Service was the first to specialize in
sf. As editor at All-American Comics (which became part of DC) from 1944
to 1986, he was involved in the revival and development of such
superheroes as The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Adam Strange, The
Atom, and Batman; from 1971 he edited Superman. As he wrote in
his autobiography: 'Here Lies Julius Schwartz. He met his last
deadline.'

Asimov's
Porn Scandal. Following one easily outraged mother's
complaint, a Michigan TV news show ran a shock horror exposé
about Asimov's SF ('an adults-only magazine ... full of sexual
content ... stories about sex, drugs, and molestation') being pushed to
innocent children. Really? Asimov's response: 'Reporter Kristi
Andersen and the News 8 anchors portrayed the QSP magazine drive as
children buying and selling magazines. As a matter of fact, in this
fundraising drive, students sell magazines to their family, their
neighbors, and their parents' coworkers. We reviewed the QSP catalog
with the reporter and showed her that many of the magazines are for
adults, including Esquire, Vogue, GQ, and Elle.
As we showed the reporter, the QSP catalog has a section specifically
geared to children, and indicates age-appropriate titles. Asimov's was
correctly listed in the catalog, not under "Children," but
under "Science/Technology/Environmental." The reporter chose
not to include this information in her report, and, in fact, said that
we "did not know it was on the school magazine list."' And so
on. The fact that Asimov's had already ceased to deal
with QSP (for financial reasons) was presented as a moral victory won by
the fearless TV station.

Paging
Mr Tucker! Can it be coincidence that the latest Lemony
Snicket outbreak, The Slippery Slope, has a cameo appearance by
one C.M. Kornbluth? 'Mr. Kornbluth was a quiet and secretive man, so
secretive that no one ever knew who he was, where he came from, or even
what the C or the M stood for, and he spent much of his time holed up in
his dormitory room writing strange stories ...' [YR]  Kevin J.
Anderson brags that he's given the young Jack Williamson a major part in
his DC Justice Society superhero comic series, set in the 1940s.

Oscars.
You read it here last. The Return of the King, nominated in 11
categories, won them all: best picture (the first genre film to get this
big one), director, adapted screenplay, film editing, score, sound
mixing, make-up, visual effects, song, costume design, and art
direction. It now ties with Ben-Hur and Titanic for most
Oscars won. Finding Nemo, narrowly edging out Gimli's eyebrows,
won as best animated feature.

Random
Fandom.Chris Bell to the rescue: 'I am assured that
the menu for the "Concourse Medieval Banquet", for which a
booking form is enclosed with PR4 for the forthcoming Easter Convention,
was not selected by Marcus Streets or Chris O'Shea, who are aware that "Baked
jacket potato" somehow lacks true Medieval authenticity.'

What
the Papers Say. 'Polyamory's intellectual genesis is often
attributed to Robert Heinlein's tedious sci-fi epic Stranger in a
Strange Land (1961); the protagonist's polysexual adventures read
like a dirty old author's wish-fulfilment.' (Sunday Telegraph
magazine, 29 February)  'With a massive cult following in the US,
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga has set the standard for space
opera fiction – she's won more Hugo awards than anyone else in the last
30 years.' (Fantasy and SF Book Club newsletter, January) [PW] Er, no
comment.  '... one is tempted to say, "It's only a TV series,
guys." But Galactic Hitchhikers, a sub-division of Trekkies and
only marginally less deranged than Doctor Who wonks, will not have it
so. They give new meaning to the word "aficionados" – lovers
of Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Fish, one of Adams's weakest
books ...' (Iain Finlayson on Hitchhiker; Times, 14 Feb)
[IG] So only nerds remember the radio series. Or get titles right.

BAFTAs:
At the mid-Feb presentation, The Return of the King won for best
film, adapted screenplay, cinematography, and visual effects. Popular
vote also made it the Orange Film of the Year. The BAFTA for best short
animation went to the fantasy Jojo in the Stars.

Thog's
Critical Masterclass.Dept of In 1877 They'd Believe
Anything: 'Although the first edition's claim that Black Beauty
was "translated from the original equine" now seems quaint or
absurd ...' (Raymond E. Jones, Characters in Children's Literature,
1997)

Publishers
and Sinners. Darren Nash, the editor who went down with
Earthlight when Simon & Schuster killed it off, joined Tim Holman's
editorial team at Time Warner/Orbit on 2 March. Earthlight founder John
Jarrold, still in the wilderness of freelancing, would love you all to
pay him to edit your unsold sf masterpieces into publishable shape
(actual publication not guaranteed): j.jarrold@btopenworld.com.

Deep
Thought. The chance to question Ursula Le Guin in the on-line
Guardian earned one seeker after truth a place in Private
Eye's Pseud's Corner: 'As opposed to the standard model of time
travellers projected into previously lived cultural patterns, what do
you make of the concept "collective experrience of temporal
variation," such as stalled, recursive or redundant sequences of
year sets. I am thinking of collective delusion or the social
construction of reality, wherein mere participation in humanity's
elaborated schedules makes distance between avowed temporal judgments
and an undercurrent of more objective time. For instance, what would
happen if global culture lost track of the passage of the years due to
the complexity of information elaborating its rote performance? I am
thinking of this not so much from a narrative science fiction
perspective as an anthropological dissonance between (world) culture and
context.' Ursula Le Guin replies: 'Sorry, the more I read your
question the stupider I feel.'

Small
Press.Prime Books, edited by Sean Wallace, has joined
his Cosmos Books as an imprint of Wildside Press. See C.o.A. below.

Outraged
Letters.Simon R. Green soldiers on: 'I'm putting
together a must-sell TV series for Channel 5: Orgasms
of the Third Reich.'  Marcus Rowland is also
disgruntled by the deeply stupid censorship imposed by Net Sweeper UK,
which at his school prevents access to reproductive-biology websites,
blocks several university chemistry sites for 'criminal content', and
bars Google searches for the filthy phrase 'chemical analysis'. 
Simo is 'starting to get a bit fed up with answering what seems
to be the most burning question in SF: The new radio series of Hitchhiker's
Guide, which was due for broadcast from 17th February, has been
indefinitely postponed. Neither I nor anyone else, including the people
who made it, know when it will be broadcast. Phrases involving the words
"organize", "BBC", "brewery" and "piss-up"
are being bandied about.'

Classics
of Our Time. I was suitably numbed to learn that Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is to appear in classical Greek:
'the longest text to have been translated into the ancient language in
1,500 years.' (BBC News) The translator, UK classics teacher
Andrew Wilson, modelled his style on the 2nd-century works of Lucian,
who was at least a fantasy (or sf) author. 'Harry Potter' apparently
comes out as 'warrior goblet'. An Irish Gaelic version is also
scheduled. Next: Elvish? Klingon?

Subscriptions.
To receive Ansible monthly via e-mail, send a message to ...
ansible-request@dcs.gla.ac.uk
... with a Subject line reading:
subscribe
(Message body text irrelevant.) Please send a corresponding
'unsubscribe' to resign from this list if you weary of it or plan to
change e-addresses. You can also manage your subscription details at
this URL:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ansible